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Impressive Recovery, But Still
A video of a DEA agent shooting himself in the foot (literally) while giving a presentation on gun safety to a group of Florida children. This occurs right after he tells them that he’s the only one in the room qualified to handle the handgun he’s carrying.
I’d mock him, but to be honest I’m impressed that he carried on the presentation relatively calmly after having shot himself.
2 Responses to “Impressive Recovery, But Still”
I’d say it’s a wonderful demonstration that no amount of training, experience, or skill leaves the handler of a firearm immune to accidents. Those kids learned a incredibly valuable lesson — valuable if they don’t decide to use firearms, and infinitely more valuable if they do. That agent couldn’t have done better if he’d planned it.
Actually, I think it was planned. And I think the round was probably a blank.
(1) Should we believe that a highly-trained federal law enforcement agent brought a pistol with one or more live rounds in it into a classroom full of kids … and left it sitting on a desk (you can hear him pick it up off of a hard surface), two or three metres away and out of his field of vision, while he made his presentation? Even if two or three adult assistants were standing right there, it should have been in someone’s hands or otherwise inaccessible. The dumbest rookie cop would know better than that, let alone a federal specialist. I’m not prepared to call him that catastrophically irresponsible and incompetent, so I find it easier to believe that it was loaded with blanks.
(2) The pistol’s slide was retracted and locked — in Glocks this is normally a sure indication that the chamber and clip are both empty. To have the slide retracted with a round still in the clip requires deliberate setup — the pistol must be emptied and a new clip inserted without resetting the slide. That doesn’t normally happen accidentally and never in the hands of someone who’s experienced with semiautomatic pistols. The pistol was consciously prepared to make a deliberate point — that no uninspected firearm can be safely considered unloaded.
(3) The timing of the “accidental” discharge coincided way, way too neatly with the content of his spiel. Coincidences happen, but I don’t think this was one.
(4) From just below waist level to the foot is about 75 cm, and at that range a blank can easily cause pain and injury, both from blast force and powder burns. He probably intended to discharge the blank round at an empty circle of floor and flubbed his timing.
(5) I’ve been an EMT-B and I have seen, up close and personal, what a large-caliber bullet does. If that were a live round and he did more than graze the edge of his foot (in which case there would have been a ricochet, and there wasn’t one), I assure you he would not have been able to be so casual about his injury.
That’s cool information–I’m far too ignorant about handguns to recognize something like that. I guess that meant it worked for me, too?